The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Don’t think about it too much, just do it. For a change of pace. It might help you figure out all kinds of things.

said Kumiko, with a hint of regret

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

She needed something more noticeable. But I couldn’t think of anything. Which is not to say that I didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics. I owned a signed copy of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. I had a slow resting pulse rate: forty-seven normally, and no higher than seventy with a high fever. I was out of work. I knew the names of all the brothers Karamazov. But none of these distinguishing characteristics was external.

Thirty seconds is all it would take to say, “I’ll be home late tonight,” and there are telephones everywhere, but you just can’t do it.

Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own-with whatever guts you can muster.

Which is better?” I asked, out of simple curiosity. “Above or below?” “It’s not that either one is better,” he said. After a brief coughing fit, he spat a glob of phlegm onto a tissue and studied it closely before crumpling the tissue and throwing it into a wastebasket. “It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness. ‘I am he and / He is me: / Spring nightfall.’ Abandon the self, and there you are.”

depth. They were lovely eyes, but they did not seem to be looking at anything. They were all surface, like glass eyes. But of course they were not glass eyes. They moved, and their lids blinked.

Until the moment the telephone rang, I had been thinking of something, but now I couldn’t remember what it was.

There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird.